The Third Alternative
by MizJoely
Summary: Amanda Rogers is feeling sorry for herself. An unexpected visitor helps put things in perspective.


The ocean crashed against the rocks. Gray rocks, gray water reflecting a gray sky, with only the white spray of the surf hinting at color. Even the sand, what little of it that could be seen, was gray.

The young woman sitting high above the waves at the top of the cliff with her knees pulled up to her chin regarded the scene without visible emotion. Just as she showed no indication that she felt the cold wind that occasionally stirred the strands of her blonde hair, or the dampness of the stone beneath her stark black jumpsuit. She raised a hand, to add some color to the world around her, or bring the weak yellow sun from behind the clouds, then dropped it. Why bother? She had the power to create a sunset that would be the envy of the tropics on the planet of her birth, to destroy that sun if she wanted to, but what would be the point? She said the words aloud. "What would be the point?"

"Does there have to be one?"

She raised her head and looked behind her, startled at receiving an answer. Seconds ago she'd been the only person on this world. She opened her mouth to demand an explanation for the stranger's presence, then closed it as she got a better look at him. "You're human." He was more than that, he was a splash of color, his jumpsuit a deep blue bordering on indigo, his skin a healthy, golden tan and his eyes... it had been too long since she'd noticed anyone's eyes, but here they stood out against the background grayness with startling clarity, vividly blue within their fringe of dark lashes.

He grinned, a flash of even white teeth against the pinkness of his lips. "Guilty as charged." He stuck out a hand. "I'm Wesley. Wesley Crusher."

She stared at his hand, then reached up tentatively with her own, fumbling with the half-forgotten courtesies of the mortal world. "Amanda," she replied automatically, still staring up at him. "Amanda Rogers."

His hand felt warm in hers, pleasant and human. She hadn't realized how much she missed such contact, nor the sound of another voice until he spoke again. "Pleased to meet you."

She studied him further, continuing to drink in the colors he brought just by being himself. That was something else she hadn't realized, how starved her eyes were for color. She'd been sitting alone on this cliff for a long time, and now she couldn't take her eyes off him, no matter how rude her staring might seem. "You're human," she repeated in a puzzled murmur.

"I thought we already established that," he replied easily. "And so are you, or am I wrong?"

She regarded him out of steady blue eyes--they were still blue, weren't they? Yes, still blue, she remembered now. Cornflower blue. She'd changed their color a few times, just because she could, the color of her eyes and hair and skin, even changed her sex and species a few times, but the novelty had quickly worn off and she'd gone back to her original features: human female, 20ish, with honey blonde hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. Colors, so many colors, but she hadn't been looking at herself, not recently. "I was born on Earth. But I'm not human." She turned away, back to her contemplation of the endless ocean before her, too sunk in lethargy to wonder what he was doing here. Even her brief infatuation with the color he brought to this gray world was just that: an infatuation. She just wanted to be left alone.

Her visitor was not so easily dismissed. He joined her, folding his lean form into a comfortable crouch, arms dangling over knees, allowing the silence to stretch on for several minutes.

In the end, she was the one who broke that silence. "How did you get here?" she asked, surprised at herself, not only for asking but for caring enough to ask in the first place. It was the first stirring of curiosity she'd felt in what might very well have been an eternity. How long had she been here? She neither knew nor cared, having long since learned to ignore any internal sense of time.

Of course, it was none of her business how he happened to be on a planet that was a long way from where any human had set foot, but the curiosity he'd stirred was growing. There had to be an explanation beyond "just being in the neighborhood."

She expected the usual--wormhole, alien abduction, experimental mode of transportation gone disastrously wrong--but was surprised again by his casual, "Translocation. It's easy once you get the hang of it."

She turned to face him, really looking at him this time, studying his features and not just automatically classifying him. Young, good-looking, short, dark hair, nice smile, wiry build, not much older than she, at least in physical appearanceutterly, normally human. Not one iota of alien DNA to account for his extraordinary words, although there was something about the aura he radiated that she couldn't quite classify. "Translocation." She sounded skeptical. "You. A human."

"Yep, me. A human." Without removing his gaze from the (gray) ocean, he picked up a small, flat (gray) rock, flung it over the edge of the (gray) cliff face, and watched with a faint smile of satisfaction as it plopped into the (gray) waves before sinking. Then he returned his attention to her. "Translocation." He seemed disinclined to explain further, instead glancing around with an expression of distaste. "So. Do you … come here often?"

That did it. The utter banality of the question broke the surreal spell, and she laughed. It felt good, it had been so long since she had a reason to laugh, and for that she was grateful. Whether he explained himself any further than he already had or not, she didn't care. Just the fact that he had made her laugh was enough.

He shook his head in mock sorrow. "The joke wasn't that good," he pointed out, which only made her laugh harder. He joined in her laughter, chuckling at her sudden happiness. It really wasn't that good a joke, he was right about that, but it didn't matter. As long as it made her laugh, drove away the dark clouds that haunted her, even for a brief moment, that was enough.

When she stopped laughing, it was to sink into another silence, comfortable this time, as if they were old friends instead of newly met, nothing awkward about it. After a few minutes, she spoke. "I knew a Beverly Crusher once." It was an invitation, to share, to speak, whatever.

"That would be my mother," he replied, accepting the invitation as instinct told her he would. "Did you meet her on the _Enterprise_?"

She nodded. "I was doing an internship. Then Q showed up." Showed up and turned her entire world, her entire life, upside down. Alice stepping through the looking-glass couldn't have felt more disoriented than she had, upon discovering the true nature of her heritage. Not human, except in aspect. Q. Omnipotent energy being. Overwhelmed young woman. And currently, runaway, hiding more from her own personal demons than the others of her "kind".

Wesley seemed unsurprised by her words, but she sensed his disappointment in the return of her black mood. Well, she was disappointed, too; it had been nice not thinking about her personal circumstances for a change. "I thought I sensed a Q here, but then I figured I'd made a mistake since there was no arrogance in the aura."

He wished he could take the words back as soon as he said them; she could tell by the stricken expression on his face as he opened his mouth to offer what she knew was going to be an apology. She stopped him with a wan smile and a quick shake of her head. "Don't worry, I'm not offended. The Q are an arrogant lot, especially the Q that brought me into the Continuum. The one you know best."

"I don't think anyone really _knows_ him," came the wry response. He pulled the collar of his jumpsuit around his neck as the wind chose that moment to pick up. Amanda tucked her hair behind her ears but remained otherwise unaffected by the sudden drop in temperature. She could have stilled the breeze with a single thought, but didn't. It was nice, just talking to someone like a normal person, and she didn't want to spoil the illusion, however fleeting.

"I'm beginning to think it's impossible to know any of the Q. Especially _him_." No need to ask which "him" Amanda meant. "It's one of the reasons I ran away," she admitted. "Because I don't understand them, any of them. And they don't understand me, no matter how badly they claimed to want me back in the Continuum. Or dead," she reflected. "Dead would have been just fine with them. It's how they dealt with my parents, killed them without giving them a chance to defend themselves." Damn, that was the problem with letting the good emotions in; the bad ones always followed.

"But you're not dead," Wesley pointed out, and Amanda suddenly remembered that Doctor Crusher was a widow; Wesley certainly understood the concept of dead parents, and probably didn't appreciate the flippant tone she'd adopted in response to her own pain.

"Obviously," she agreed, more seriously. "No thanks to any of the Q; it was only after Captain Picard stepped in and--" She stopped short, transfixed by a memory she'd never really examined in depth. The rush of events after Q's appearance had been so overwhelming, she hadn't spent any time analyzing Picard's actions and the effect those actions had on Q. "Q let the captain convince him not to kill me," she murmured in sudden realization. She turned her gaze back to Wesley. "You know, he never lets anyone tell him what to do, certainly not anyone outside the Continuum. But he let Captain Picard influence him."

"He's always been that way, arrogant and superior one minute, allowing himself to show vulnerability the next," Wesley agreed. "Not a lot of vulnerability, but just enough to make it easier to understand why Captain Picard treats him the way he does. Like an annoyance to be tolerated, a mosquito you can't get your hands on that eventually takes some blood and leaves."

"Only to come buzzing back around again?" Amanda finished the metaphor with a smile, enjoying the mental picture of Q's head on a mosquito's body while Picard swatted irritably at him. Her smile faded. "He let Captain Picard influence him, and he convinced me the best thing for me to do would be to return with him to the Continuum, that I couldn't live on Earth knowing who I knowing _what_ I was," she corrected herself. "So I went. But they didn't want me," she continued in a rush, not bothering to analyze her reasons for telling a perfect stranger about the problems she'd faced ever since discovering her true origins. "They were intrigued by the idea of me, a Q that had been born like a normal human outside the Continuum. They thought they would just fold me in, assimilate me like the Borg, add my distinctiveness to their collective and there I'd be, a perfect Q drone." He voice filled with bitterness, the laughter completely drained away as she contemplated her life. She'd come here to try and get away from the unbelievably complicated mess that life had become, to find peace, only to find it was as much an illusion as her childhood had been.

"But it didn't work out that way," Wesley pointed out. "You still call yourself Amanda Rogers, right?"

She stared at him. "I guess I do. They call me Q, or q," she added with a grimace. "They still consider me a juvenile, and I suppose by the standards of a collection of eternal omnipotent beings, I am." She shrugged, returning her attention to the clouds gathering on the far horizon. "But it doesn't change the fact that Q lied to me in order to get me to see things his way."

"Q? Lie? I'm stunned," Wesley said, straight faced, but the smile she responded with was forced. The merriment in his eyes disappeared. "What did he lie about?" was the next, quiet question.

"Just about everything." The bitterness spilled out, the anger she'd felt constrained to keep bottled up for far too long. "He lied about my abilities and what I could do about them. He said I only had two choices: renounce them completely or return to the Continuum. He never mentioned the third choice."

"Allow them to strip your powers from you forever, surrender your Q-ness, turn your back on the Continuum and live life as a normal human,," Wesley finished for her.

She studied him, disconcerted by his unexpected understanding of her situation. He was looking placidly out over the ocean, arms still resting comfortably on his knees. Still reading completely human, except for that bothersome, unidentifiable itch his aura was giving off. "If that was a possibility, can you tell me why you're the only person who's ever mentioned it to me?"

"If I'm the only one, then how did you know it existed?" Wesley countered, dodging the question. But only for now; she was determined to have the answer, if he never told her anything else about himself. Without thinking about it, she laid a hand on his, drawing his attention back to her, until their eyes met once again. But he remained silent, waiting, she realized, for her to answer his question before he answered hers.

"I figured it out when another Q taunted Q about his stint as a, what was the phrase, bipedal life form," Amanda finally replied. "He shut up as soon as they realized I was listening, and Q wouldn't talk to me about it. Not that he ever talks to me about anything," she added, "but he flat out refused to discuss it, didn't even bother evading me or making a joke like he usually does."

"I can see why he'd be kind of sensitive about it." A reminiscent grin lifted the edges of Wesley's mouth. "It wasn't one of his finest hours, at least not at first." The grin faded. "In the end, he redeemed himself, was willing to sacrifice himself to save the ship. That's how he got back into the Continuum."

"So he was on the _Enterprise_ when it happened." Wesley nodded. "Then why didn't anyone say something to me?" she demanded, abruptly pulling her hand away, clenching it into a tight, frustrated fist. "Why didn't Captain Picard suggest the possibility, or your mother? She was my champion, she fought for me to retain my humanity harder than anyone else." She'd almost returned to the ship to demand the answers from them herself, but didn't. In the end, it hadn't seemed worth it.

"Because Q tampered with their memories," Wesley replied flatly. His eyes, gentle and merry, had turned hard, reflecting the gray background and nothing else. "I went back for a visit, not too long after I left to 'discover' myself." He made a derogatory grimace. "I wanted to find the limits of my abilities, to stretch myself mentally, but I couldn't just abandon my friends and family, not all at once. Once the initial euphoria wore off, I realized I had left without saying a proper good bye. So I went home, and found Q's mental fingerprints all over my mother's mind, and Captain Picard's, anyone, I figured out later, who had been around when Q was turned human."

"So none of them would think to mention it to me when Q offered me choices," Amanda said with a frown.

"I thought it was because it was so embarrassing to him, too shameful for the mere 'bipedal lifeforms' to be allowed to remember," Wesley said. Amanda nodded; that sounded like Q. "I might never have realized what had happened if I hadn't been too loose with my control of my own abilities." He sounded a bit embarrassed himself. "I strayed into my mother's mind by accident, and that was the first thing I sensed, before any of her own thoughts could come through. A Q had been in there, tampering, and she didn't even know it."

"I thought they were just glad to be rid of me," Amanda blurted out. What was it about Wesley that made her want to reveal her deepest darkest secrets to him? It wasn't a romantic attachment, although he was attractive enough. Being a Q had pretty much leached that part of her away, into the eternal dullness that the Continuum had become until the war had broken out. She still didn't know how that had turned out, which side had won, but since no one had bothered to come looking for her, she didn't bother to find out.

"You know better than that," Wesley chided her gently, and she bit her lip in shame. Another almost forgotten gesture; he certainly had a gift for reminding her of her humanity. "They would never just abandon you. Especially not to Q and the Continuum."

"I know," she murmured. "In my heart, I knew that. But I was afraid to go back and face them. Now that I'm Q, I'm a nuisance, another mosquito buzzing around. Even if I gave up my powers and tried to live a normal life again, that would always haunt me. I'd wonder what I could have done if I'd kept them, what kind of a difference I could have made. Not that I've achieved anything so far," she added bitterly. "I'm just as bad as the rest of them; give me enough time and I'm bound do something stupid and capricious." She rose abruptly and stepped deliberately over the edge of the cliff. She didn't fall, of course, merely "stood" there, over empty space, while the ocean crashed and churned far beneath her feet. "Besides, how could a girl give up all this power? Maybe Q was right to keep that choice from me."

Wesley slowly rose to his own feet, smiling at her, a sad smile this time. "Don't."

Amanda stared back at him. "Don't what? It's true, isn't it? I chose to keep this power. I could probably get the Q to take it away from me any time I asked, but I've never tried. Too selfish, I guess." That was the heart of her discontent; she'd discovered the third alternative and never even considered taking it.

Wesley shook his head. "You're not being selfish."

"Aren't I?" She flung the words like a challenge as she suddenly changed shape. She was a fairy, glowing, bewinged, gowned in lacy purple gauze like the illustrations in her favorite childhood story book. Then she changed again, into the image of a witch, black hat, warts, even a broom in one hand. She changed again, and again, and again, a dizzying array of forms, too many to follow. Wesley didn't even appear to try. He just stood there, silent and waiting, until she stopped as abruptly as she had begun. Back in her own form, she stared at him. "I chose to keep this power. Just like the rest of the Q, I don't do a damned worthwhile thing with it. Tell me that isn't selfish."

Wesley shrugged. "You wouldn't believe me if I did. So I won't. But I will tell you this." He leaned forward, staring at her intently, catching her gaze with his own and holding it. "What you do with it in the future is up to you, not up to them. Things have changed in the Continuum, while you've been away. The war is over, and I think you might be surprised at what you discover when you return."

"How do you know all this?" she whispered, bewildered. "You're not Q, how can you know all this?"

"I just do. It's part of being a Traveler." She almost accused him of being evasive, but stopped as she realized it was the only answer he had to offer. Just as she could shrug and say, it's because I'm Q.

"How long have you known you're a Q?" Wesley continued. "A few years? That's just a drop in the immortal bucket. So you've been unhappy with yourself and the Continuum. There's plenty of time for you to figure out what you want to do with yourself and your powers. You did choose to keep them, but I don't think it's because you like to change yourself into a fairy princess and hover." He grinned at her blush. "I think you just need to figure out what your mission is, find your dream, and then follow it."

Amanda vanished in a blaze of Q light, then reappeared by Wesley's side. Leaning forward , she impulsively kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you."

It was his turn to blush. "For what? Lecturing you on responsibility? You could have gone back to the _Enterprise_ and Captain Picard for that. He's way better at it than I am."

She laughed. "No, for helping me put things in perspective. It sounds like someone must have given you a very similar lecture at some point."

"You caught me," Wesley admitted with another smile, a shy one this time that made him look as young as he really was. Not much older than herself, not by a longshot. "So. Enough lecturing for one day. Why don't you go find a planet with a better view?" He looked around with an air of exaggerated distaste. "This one's kind of washed out."

"I have a better idea," Amanda replied, taking his hand in hers. "Why don't you come with me? Maybe you can help me figure out my dream. It gets kind of lonely out here."

He gently disengaged his fingers, but not before a look of longing flashed briefly across his face. "I'm sorry, but that's something you have to figure out on your own. I've already helped as much as I can." There was true regret, in his voice and his eyes, and Amanda accepted his words without argument.

"Then I guess this is good-bye. For now," she added, smiling. "When I figure things out, I'll let you know." She vanished, but not before turning herself back into the fairy princess and blowing him a kiss.

Wesley grinned as the flare of light vanished. "Man, I wish I could've met you when you thought you were still human," he murmured regretfully.

The tall gray form of his Traveler mentor suddenly appeared beside him, joining him in his contemplation of the waves at the base of the cliff. After a few minutes, Wesley spoke. "Do you think she'll find her path?"

"Now that she has spoken to you," his mentor replied. He turned his serene gaze from the gray ocean to Wesley. "After all, helping others find their dream is the path you chose." He vanished, and after a moment so did Wesley, leaving the empty gray world to itself.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

_A/N: If anyone thinks this story looks familiar, I had it posted on Fanfic for a while, then took it down when I (optimistically) submitted it to the_ Strange New Worlds _Anthology_. _Since it's back here, you can tell how that went. It's my only Wesley/Amanda story (so far). Enjoy!_


End file.
